


Perfect

by unknownlifeform



Series: Mako green and Dust gold [7]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Canon Compliant, Dirge of Cerberus references, Gen, Past Lucrecia Crescent/Vincent Valentine - Freeform, Snippets, Vincent Valentine Centric, there are other characters but they are less important, well canon compliant daemonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24734122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknownlifeform/pseuds/unknownlifeform
Summary: The daemon of adults are settled into on form and one alone. The one that represents their personality, identity, soul.Vincent Valentine is an exception to that rule.
Series: Mako green and Dust gold [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1801477
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	Perfect

**Author's Note:**

> My need for daemon au has been stoked (specifically, the fic [Laimadura](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24656410) by CreamofTomatoSoup has stoked it, because it's good as fuck) and I have now approximately twenty ideas for fics, so have a Vincent one for starters

Vincent closed the coffin lid once again, hiding from the eyes of the blonde boy and his cat daemon. Hopefully, they would not try to wake Vincent again.

Their conversation had been brief, but more than enough to shake Vincent. To think that was what had become of Sephiroth... Yet another thing Vincent was to blame for. Had Vincent stopped Lucrecia, had Sephiroth been born a normal child, then nothing of what Cloud had been speaking of would have happened. Sins, sins, sins.

Vincent closed his eyes, waiting for the nightmares to take him once again.

"This is not only a nightmare for us now."

"...Carminia?" Vincent whispered. It was rare for her to speak, ever since the experiments. Her voice was rough with disuse.

He felt her move from her positions at his feet, climbing over his legs. "If Sephiroth is not stopped, it will be a nightmare for the whole world."

"It already is."

"Yes."

"Why didn't we stop her?"

"Lucrecia made her decision, Vincent," Carminia said. "There was nothing we could have done to stop her."

"You don't know that for sure. We could have tried harder."

"And Hojo would have shot us earlier."

Vincent swallowed, trying to rid himself of the bitterness that filled his mouth when he heard that name. "Maybe we should have shot him instead."

"We really should have."

That man had been the one to put the idea in Lucrecia's mind. To turn Sephiroth into this monster Cloud spoke of. He should suffer for it, be punished twice as hard as Vincent was punishing himself.

"Let's go," Vincent said, throwing open the coffin. Carminia climbed up, curling inside his collar.

Cloud and his companions were still making their way out of the basement when Vincent caught up with them.

"If I go with you, will I meet Hojo?" he asked. It was way too late for him to try and fix his mistakes, but at least he could make Hojo pay for all that he had to account for.

Carminia's small head poked out of his collar, and then she climbed out, standing on his shoulder. No doubt she was studying the other daemons, trying to figure out what they said about their humans, the way they had been taught when they were Turks. The daemons, for their part, stuck close to their humans, except for the one of the young girl with short hair. He was a small monkey, and he looked at Carminia with curiosity, having jumped off his human and made a few steps towards Vincent.

Carminia was a dormouse, a fitting choice for a years long sleep. She jumped off of Vincent's shoulder, and when she landed she was also a monkey.

The other daemon jumped in surprise.

"This is Carminia," Vincent said, introducing her.

The others, humans and daemons alike, stared at with shock. Vincent did not blame them. The daemon of a man his age should have long settled.

Should.

***

It was not painful for Vincent to take on the body of one of the monsters, but it far from enjoyable to change.

Galian Beast roared. The world was different through its eyes. The colors were muted, but his eyesight was much better, able to spot the smallest of movements. Vincent shook his head, or perhaps Galian Beast did. It was hard to tell when one started and the other ended.

Carminia's form shook and trembled. She had been a hawk, when Vincent had changed, but now she landed on the ground. She was a cat, a dog, something strange and undefined, and then she was a tiger, roaring alongside him.

To human eyes, her transformations would have not looked strange. But Vincent could see through demon's eyes when he was like this. He saw the golden halo surrounding daemons. He saw Carminia, and how for a moment she was less an animal and more of a cloud of Dust, swelling and shrinking and twisting.

When the fight was over, she abandoned that too large tiger form, shrinking to a normal house cat. Vincent felt her change, through their bond. Her transformations were not the fluid, natural flow of a child's daemon. They sent shivers down his spine.

She had the same sensation when it was Vincent who changed.

He caught Nanaki looking at them. It was hard sometimes to interpret his expressions, animal as they were, but Vincent thought he saw a concerned frown.

Nanaki didn't speak. Vincent didn't know what his eyes could see. Nanaki had no daemon of his own, but he seemed to understand them well.

***

Lucrecia's daemon was how he had always been. Beautiful, delicate.

Short lived.

Lucrecia had once told him moths like Jude did not have mouths in their adult form. They would only live for a short time, in order to reproduce, and then die. In hindsight, Vincent thought perhaps there was such a thing as a daemon that fit the humans far too well.

Like Lucrecia, Jude was now encased in crystal, his wings forever stuck on a beat. Nothing more than a pretty pin on Lucrecia's breast. Vincent's heart ached to see them that way.

Carminia did not seem to agree. She was a bat, when they got to the cave. She hung on Vincent's cape in morose silence.

"Some days I wish we had never met them," she told him later.

Vincent shook his head. "I could never wish for that."

"If we hadn't, we wouldn't be- We wouldn't be this way."

Vincent did not answer. She was right, as she always was. Had they never been assigned to watch over Lucrecia, Vincent would be a normal man, and Carminia a normal daemon. So much pain would have been avoided.

Vincent couldn't say whether the happiness he had felt in that brief period was worth all this pain. Either way, his heart had not moved on, even if it seemed his soul had.

***

"How come your daemon isn't settled?" Yuffie asked.

It wasn't polite to ask questions about someone else's daemon. No one had mentioned Carminia's unusual state so far, even if Vincent could see how uneasy his companions still got when they saw her change.

Yuffie, however, had a very loose relationships with politeness. She wasn't a bad girl, but she did seem to lack tact at times.

Even if no one else said anything, Vincent could almost see how the rest of their companions tensed, trying to listen in.

"She used to be. Once," Vincent said.

Carminia was a snake then, curled around Vincent's arm. Her coils tightened.

"What? No way, everyone knows it's impossible for daemons to change after settling. Wait, do you think you could teach Shin too?"

"Hey!" Perched on her human's shoulder, Shin pulled Yuffie hair. "My form is great!"

"But imagine if you could still change! That way if we needed to do some undercover ninja work no one would recognize us!"

Vincent smiled. Yuffie was still so young. Shin couldn't have settled more than two or three years before. She was probably still in that phase all kids went through when they had just settled, the one when they wished their daemon could still change. Maybe turn into an animal that was bigger, prettier, scarier, stranger. Everyone was that way at first.

Vincent had been like that as well, once. Carminia had settled when he was thirteen, and for months he had been thinking about all the other shapes she could have chosen. It had taken him some time to realize that it didn't matter if she wasn't his favorite animal, or the most unique daemon in the world. She had been _him_ , and she had been _perfect_.

She could still wear her old form, but she rarely did. It made them both ache to see it. Having an unsettled daemon had its pros, but there was a peculiar kind of pain in knowing they had been perfectly matched once, and now they were not.

"I can't teach him," Vincent said. "It's not something I learnt."

"Then how did it happen?"

Vincent shook his head. "She became unsettled after I got the others."

"Those demons, you mean? They don't have their own daemons, right? Is she like your group daemon now?"

"She's mine," Vincent replied, and that was maybe harsher than he had meant to. Carminia was  _his_ daemon,  _his_ soul. Vincent may be sharing a body with those things, but he did not share  _her_ .

His tone must have convinced Yuffie to drop the argument, because she ran off, going to annoy Cid instead.

***

Chaos was different from the others.

Vincent had the feeling he should know why. There was something Chaos reminded him of, something he must have heard once, but he couldn't place his finger on what. He knew, with a strange kind of certainty, that Chaos had been the last one to be put inside him, but he didn't remember how he had acquired him.

Truth to be told, Vincent had no memory of most of the experiments that had been ran on him. There was a confused void between being shot and waking up again like this. It was maybe for the best that he didn't remember.

Chaos was smarter than the other ones. More complex. Galian Beast, Hellmasker, Death Gigas, they were easy to figure out. The first was basically an animal, and the other two little more than that. Jumbles of instincts and killing intent and some barebone intelligence.

Chaos had emotions, maybe even feelings. He could run a conversation in Vincent's head and would often do so, and he understood humans well. There was something of him that scared Vincent, because Chaos was a _person_.

Carminia _hated_ Chaos. She disliked all of them, but Chaos was her least favorite by far. Whenever Vincent was Chaos, she stayed as far away from him as possible, stretching the limits of their bond. The moment Chaos was once again locked in a corner of Vincent's mind, she'd come back running to him, twisting herself in the smallest animal she could and crawling under his clothes.

"He's wrong," she told Vincent once.

"How so?"

"He feels like someone else?"

"Like another human?" Vincent asked.

"No. But like a person, yes. I'm terrified he might touch me."

If he did, it would be Vincent touching her, or so it should be, at least. Vincent was always there, no matter his form. With the others, Carminia did not found it troubling to touch him. It was only Chaos she couldn't stomach.

Vincent understood. Sometimes... Sometimes he almost thought Chaos should have a daemon of his own.

Whenever he pondered that, there was a strange pulse in his chest. A warmth spreading under his skin, always starting from the same point. Right in that point, Vincent knew, was a weird scar, one he didn't remember getting.

He almost wondered if someone had put something in him, because it was always from the same exact point, and always when Vincent thought of Chaos.

For some reason, having that warmth in him always felt so viscerally _wrong_.

***

Vincent had known something was messed up with Hojo the moment he had set his eyes on his daemon. What kind of man has a _human_ daemon, he thought.

At first, he had tried to rationalize it. Humans were supposedly the smartest animals in the world, and Hojo was a scientist, it made sense. Later, he thought maybe it was because humans were the only animals who were truly capable of evil, and Hojo was rotten to the core.

He understood better now. The man who has a human daemon is the one who thinks humans are no different from any other animal. They were all just lab rats, for Hojo.

She stood next to her raving human, and Vincent realized that for all that he had known Hojo, he had never found out what his daemon was named. It figured Hojo would not bother to give his soul any importance.

Then Hojo's body started turning into some grotesque, revolting form, and the woman daemon screamed. She fell to her knees, shaking, while Hojo became in all ways the monster he had been inside. Vincent almost felt sorry for that daemon. _Almost_.

Through their bond, he felt Carminia's hatred for the woman daemon. Just as Vincent had hated the man, Carminia had hated the soul.

He aimed his gun at the daemon, apparently forgotten by what had earlier been her human, and shot. It passed straight through her forehead, and she disappeared in a burst of Dust. Maybe he should have let Carminia kill her, get her own revenge, but she knew exactly what Carminia had thought of that daemon. She hadn't wanted to touch her, not even to maul her to death.

The monster in front of them screamed, but didn't drop dead. Whatever Hojo had done to himself, it must have cut the bond between himself and his daemon.

Next to Vincent, Cloud readied his sword for battle, staring at that monster with the same hatred and disgust Vincent himself felt.

***

Vincent did not fear death.

In truth, Vincent Valentine had died once already.

It was right there at the edge of his memories, right before he passed out on the floor with his chest full of gunshot holes. Carminia, the way she used to be, shaking next to him. Another man might have thought that an hallucination brought on by pain, but Vincent knew what he had seen.

He had seen golden Dust starting to bleed from his daemon.

He didn't know what had been done to them, how could a daemon be dragged back once it had started to disappear. But she had never been the same, after. Her Dust refused to be forced back into the old body it had started to abandon. It wasn't that she could change. She simply struggled to keep a form at all.

And in that, they were the same. Two creatures who should have died, but were now alive only thanks to something that forced their bodies to twist and transform. Vincent had his demons pushing at the back of his mind, Carminia had her unstable Dust.

_Wrong, wrong, wrong_ , Vincent's mind chanted, as Carminia turned into an eagle. _Wrong, wrong, wrong_ , he heard back from her thoughts, as he let Chaos out. 

Midgar was burning, and someone had to help people escape until Cloud and the others managed to get rid of Sephiroth. Carminia and Vincent could fly, like this, survey the area from above and find out where they were needed the most. The other Turks and Yuffie could take the ground, Vincent would help them from above.

Carminia called, spotting danger, flying down. Vincent followed her, and even in the destruction around them they were careful to not let her wings and Chaos's touch each other. Not her human, not his daemon.  Unstable, unnatural creatures, unable to be themselves and themselves alone.

Truly a perfect pair.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons featured:  
> Carminia - unstable/unsettled  
> Jude - Luna moth  
> Shin - white fronted capuchin monkey  
> Hojo's daemon - human


End file.
